robglazebrook.com

Now, obviously I don’t condone this sort of thing, but it certainly does have a certain amount of amusement, and I appreciate anything that injects a bit of mirth into my daily routine. BoingBoing, blog to beat all blogs and information service to far more people than you’d like to think, got hacked a few minutes ago. In case they’ve fixed it by the time you read this, here’s a screenshot of the damage:

I sincerely hope the hacker didn’t do anything stupid (such as mess with the archives or the db files if they weren’t in MySQL). If so, they should be fried, hanged, shaved and then burned, cause that’s just not cool. As long as all he/she did was overwrite the index file or rewrite the .htaccess file, I’d say it’s a Halloween prank and nothing more.

Unless BoingBoing is self-pranking, but that’s also not entirely cool and more than a bit strange. :)

Update 4:07pm: It could also just be a confuzzled server or a botched domain registry. Check out freedonia.com.

You’d never believe it, but I survived my homework last night. Then again, I doubt many of you would believe I were Blogging from the Beyond right about now, so really, what does that leave you with? Nothing, I suppose, and that’s just not acceptable. So here’s this: I survived last night, which seems surprising, but is certainly more likely than the obvious alternatives.

I got to a stopping point on my PowerPoint around 11:30pm. I’d like to say I finished it, but there’s a lot of things I would have liked to have done given an infinite amount of time, and that’s something I don’t have. However, I have a beginning slide and an ending slide and forty-five or so other ones in between, and a fair degree of continuity cohering them all into one yummy gooey mess, so that will have to do.

However, after that, I was tired. Really tired. And I hadn’t started writing my story yet. The real problem with this story, is it had to be based on a story taken from this collection of short stories we have. And I hadn’t read any of them. So I took the book to bed with me and scanned the titles for something that sounded like it would appeal to my tastes. I settled on Tony Earley’s “the Prophet from Jupiter” because that sounded like a title I could really sink my noggin into.

Turns out, the title’s about some guy from Jupiter, Florida. Which wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. It stuck a grain of a story in my mind, though. Something about my hometown. So I went to bed and let that little grain ferment in my skull. And by the time I woke up six hours later, it’d turned into something tasty. I spent every one of the four hours I had before class writing the story, and got it done just in time to shower and go. And I don’t think it’s half bad. I like it, at least, and I’ve gotten one or two good comments so far. It’s completely non-speculative, though, which isn’t like me.

I’ll still be spending all tonight doing homework. I need to write my testing report and a memo to go with my PowerPoint, and that’ll probably take me more hours than I care to think about just now. If I don’t get a chance to update again tonight, have a good Wednesday (*hump* day, in Gnomespeak).

Yano what? Having this w.bloggar thing running in the system tray is the best thing that ever happened to this blog. *grin* I often feel chatty while working on homework or a project at work, and I don’t normally have anyone to talk to. Now, with the help of w.bloggar, my incessant rambling can go where it was always meant to. :)

That was my way of apologizing in advance.

Guess what I found out yesterday while signing up for next semester’s classes? The ONE required class I have yet to take, the ONE class I need to graduate, the ONE class I was planning on taking next semester that’s only offered in the spring, has been cancelled. Ahhh!

Luckily, my advisor is a wonderful person and is working hard on a solution. She’s promised that, one way or another, I’ll graduate next semester. She keeps telling me not to stress out about it, that I won’t be penalized for someone else’s mistake. So that’s cool, I guess, though my stress level is already high enough I can’t ~help~ but worry.

Reb’s site has a beautiful new design, so stop by and have a look-see. She has a level of subtlety to her designs that I have yet to be able to capture. My designs all scream, “Look! I’m here! I’m new! Loooooook!” like a persistent three-year-old with a new toy. Or, I’m sure Megan would argue, me on any given night I’m feeling neglected. :)

Luckily for her, I won’t have time to feel neglected in the coming few nights. I’m going to be up to my ears in homework. Or, since homework involves so much of the brain, would that be down to my toes? Regardless, I’ve got a lot of it. And I mean a ~lot~. Tonight, after I get home from both jobs, I’ll be writing a ten-page story (about what, I don’t know), finishing my PowerPoint tutorial, and writing my several-page testing report on the usability testing I’ve conducted on the tutorial. They have to go in that order, too. The story is due tomorrow, and the others I can feasibility put off until tomorrow night if I absolutely have to. The only problem with that, is, I’m not sure I can get those last two done in one night of work, so I’d much prefer to at least start them tonight.

Okay, here’s the scoop: blogBuddy is out. w.bloggar is in.

It’s not that blogBuddy didn’t work. It did, and that was a nice, pleasant surprise. It’s just that w.bloggar is better. And I mean no offense to the developers of blogBuddy… it’s plain to see they’ve put a lot of work into the program. But I’ve been with w.bloggar for about sixteen hours now (yes, a whole sixteen hours), and it’s pretty darn cool. :) For example:

• First and foremost, w.bloggar supports titles. blogBuddy simply took the first five words of my post and made it a title. I didn’t notice the oversight at first, but it quickly became obvious when I checked my site.
• w.bloggar is ~pretty~! It’s got colorful icons and downloadable, customizeable skins. The buttons make sense and are layed out intuitively.
• More than one user can use w.bloggar. This is significant. Megan and I both blog, and both of our blog types (Blogger and Movable Type, respectively) are supported by either program. However, if Megan wanted to use blogBuddy, she would have had to reconfigure the entire program, and I would have had to change it back when I wanted to use it. That would grow old quickly.
• w.bloggar supports a surprising number of services. blogBuddy supports Blogger and Movable Type, two very popular publishing systems, to be sure. w.bloggar supports those, as well as over a dozen more, including Livejournal.
• With w.bloggar, I can edit previous posts that I didn’t even create with the program! For example, I used w.bloggar to edit the title that blogBuddy created.

In other words, w.bloggar is a pretty cool program. There’s other stuff that I didn’t even mention, like the built-in spell checker and the ability to upload files with the click of a button. I’m constantly looking for ways to make blogging easier (and thus increasing the frequency I bother to do it), and this is definitely one of those. I’d recommend the program to anyone who uses any of the major publishing systems (Movable Type, Blogger, b2, TypePad, Livejournal, Nucleus, etc). It’s even available in Spanish, French, Portugese and half a dozen other languages.

Did I mention that it’s completely free? Unless you feel like donating, and this is one of those rare programs where I might.